If Cooks Could Kill

Don't be fooled by her sunny disposition. Chef-author Gabrielle Hamilton wants deeply personal food for all—and is willing to draw her knives for it.

Gabrielle Hamilton is taking care of everybody and everything around her. One moment, the 45-year-old owner and chef of Prune in Manhattan's East Village is in a crammed basement kitchen making sure one of her cooks understands how to make the rosemary lollipops that serve as the stirrers in the restaurant's champagne cocktail. Then she's checking, with a finger-lick, that the gooey fondant base for the hot chocolate is sweet, but not overly so. When the phone rings, Hamilton's taking reservations and struggling to explain to caller after caller why getting a table at her 11-year-old, 30-seat eatery during prime dining hours can be so damn hard. "I don't know," she says, characteristically refusing to get into the matter of her cultish popularity. "People like it here?"

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It's eleven in the morning, and Hamilton, dressed in a tan cardigan, a knee-length corduroy skirt, and leather riding boots, with her bleach-streaked hair pulled back in a bun, has been up since four. "Answering e-mails," she says. "Working shit out in my head." Around seven, her kids get up. Marco is six; Leone, four. And Hamilton, separated but not quite divorced from her husband of eight years, feeds them, cleans them, and holds them before taking off for the restaurant, just down the street, where she tends to the needs of her cooks and her chefs; her porters and hostesses; her waitresses, bartenders, and dishwashers. "There's no yoga," she quips. "After e-mails, I start recipe testing. And for the last five years I've been writing my book!"

She's talking about her eagerly anticipated memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter, which has earned exuberant advance praise (Mario Batali's cover blurb: "I will read this book to my children and then burn all the books I have written for pretending to be anything even close to this. After that I will apply for the dishwasher job at Prune to learn from my new queen") and was excerpted in The New Yorker. Considering Hamilton's time constraints, it's amazing she finished the book at all. "From the time I get in," she says, "it's `Come look at the mixer. It's broken.' `Come check out these onions.' `Come sign for the liquor.' Then I pay all the bills. I make sure there's money for everyone on Friday. Make sure the right products are all here and that the machines are working and the electricity will be on for another month." Hamilton pauses to inspect a tray of golf ball–size lamb sausages. "Getting people what they need," she says, "that's my entire job."

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It's this way of boiling things down that put Hamilton on the culinary map, too. Before opening Prune in 1999, she had worked in the food industry since the age of 13, moving up from washing dishes to making salads to helming catering kitchens and assembly-lining the most impersonal kinds of foods imaginable. "Five thousand gazpacho shooters for a banking convention," Hamilton says. "Enough tuna tartare for every Labor Day wedding in the tristate area!" Which is why everything about her plans for Prune—and they weren't so much plans as evolving thoughts—had to be uncompromisingly personal.

For starters, Hamilton was a woman, with many female employees, in the otherwise male-dominated food world of the late 1990s. Without meaning to be, she was quickly labeled a feminist crusader of the cutting boards. "I've been asked a thousand times to talk about what it means to be a woman in this industry," she says. "Everybody wants a simple answer, and it's just not like that. It's complicated and not always that pleasant." It's also becoming a nonissue. With so many of the country's most talented and ballsy chefs possessing two X chromosomes, it would be ludicrous to perpetuate special categories for them as if they were still glaringly in the minority. When Hamilton opened Prune, she was one of few female chef-owners in New York, but it was her aggressive point of view, not her gender, that got people's attention. Hamilton geared her menu toward cooking only what she wanted to eat. For a girl raised in rural New Hope, Pennsylvania, by a French mother who foraged for slugs and a bohemian father who threw blowout lamb roasts in the backyard near the creek, that meant offering up whole suckling pigs, roasted marrow bones, and fat Moroccan sardines with Triscuits. In other words, Gabrielle Hamilton wasn't second-guessing her gut and thinking, Maybe it would better for profit margins if I served more steaks?

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"Gabrielle was way ahead of a lot of things that, for lack of a better term, would become trends," says Anthony Bourdain, her friend, fellow chef-author, and host of the Travel Channel's stalwart hit No Reservations. "She seemed to come out of nowhere to open this ferociously independent and important restaurant. It was really `my way or the highway' from the very beginning with her. She hooked into all kinds of foods that chefs like to eat, but also showed an independence of spirit and a courage that a lot of chefs, at the time, didn't have. She did straight-ahead, delicious food in a nonintimidating, bullshit-free environment. That's kind of a trend now, but back then, it was just Gabrielle being who she is."

Every item on Hamilton's menu has special significance to her. From the fried-oyster omelet with its finger bowl of hot sauce and powdered sugar to the fist-shaped hamburger on a garlicky English muffin stacked with shards of extra-sharp cheddar, Hamilton either grew up with the dish or adopted it along the way. And her cooking is all about mastering core kitchen techniques, which is precisely why people who come to Prune for the first time and order, say, a simply prepared roasted branzino seem absolutely confounded by its superiority. It's also the reason customers fill her restaurant for lunch at 11:30 on the dot, and today is no different.

Hamilton snags us a nicked and unstable two-top, cozily stuffed in a nook between the front door and the bar, with its extensive collection of naked-lady glasses displayed on a ledge. "Most restaurants don't have fucked-up floors and tables," she says, down on one knee, laughing loudly and correcting the imbalance with a wobble wedge. It's true there's a laundry list of quirks about the space, but with its arabesqued faux-tin ceiling, scuffed white walls, and frosty hand-me-down mirrors, it also feels like the shabby-chic interiors of comfortable, reliable old Europe.

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The light pouring through the windows makes our food look almost stage-lit. Hamilton starts in on her sweetbreads while I dig into my open-faced ratatouille, spread on a grilled piece of ciabatta. There's a squiggle of lemony aioli on top and a smattering of poppy seeds. "How's your sandwich?" asks Hamilton. Her tone is such that she's looking for criticism, not compliments. But there's no critique to give. The thing is perfect. Actually, it's genius and truthful if, indeed, stewed vegetables on bread can be such things. In her memoir, Hamilton writes about how her mother, a former ballet dancer and a brilliant home cook, used to pack her a version of this sandwich for lunch when she was growing up with her four siblings in "a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth- century silk mill," she writes.

Like Prune, which starts as a restaurant but ultimately resonates as a feeling, Blood, Bones, and Butter uses the edible, subtly and skillfully, to initiate and announce the exploration of bigger things. In Hamilton's writing, food is treated like a symptom: She uses it time and time again to introduce her condition. The dissolution of her parents' marriage is made all the more jarring by the realization that it leaves the family cupboards bare, and the children hungry and unsupervised, for months on end. When Hamilton's own marriage disintegrates, her loss is heightened as she faces a potential severing of ties with her dear Italian mother-in-law, whose old-country cooking had revivified her in innumerable ways.

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Through robust sandwiches, hearty roasts, Turkish dumplings, tins of fish, and hand-rolled pastas shaped like penises and ears, the reader comes away with an enhanced understanding of Hamilton's complicated, at times heartbreaking, life. After her parents' split, the idyllic backyard parties ended. The "wild castle" started to feel more like a haunted asylum. Hamilton writes movingly about her parents, who, after separating, left her alone at age 13 for an entire summer—Mom moved to Vermont; Dad was scouring for jobs. It was their initial absence that sent Hamilton into a restaurant's kitchen to work for the first time. With no parents around to take care of her, she had to learn early how to fend for herself, eventually moving to New York at 16 and settling into a routine of cocktail waitressing, snorting lines of cocaine, and stealing ketchup packets from McDonald's, with which she'd cook spaghetti dinners. Of course, Hamilton writes plenty about her career in the food-service business as well—not exposé style à la Kitchen Confidential, but in a way that brings forward the chef's in-process ideas about maternal love, family breakdowns, and busted romances; on feeling lost, insufficient, hungry, open-minded, and poor.

"It's 50 billion times harder to be a writer than it is to be a chef," says Hamilton, who earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 1997. "I wrote this book, literally, by hand on a cutting board, in bed, with a child sleeping on either side of me. When I lived in Brooklyn, I wrote in the car in bumper-to-bumper traffic coming across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way in to work. I craved that Room of One's Own idea, having specific space to get the writing done, but it was not a possibility for me. I was in my tiny office in the restaurant's basement with noise-canceling headphones on, listening to Springsteen and Pearl Jam. You've got to get it down when you can."

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What she has managed to get down on the page is one of the most emotionally incisive, jarringly honest, and somehow truly funny memoirs of the year—precisely because it's the complete story of a person and not just another protracted coming-of-age tale about a celebrity chef in one of the moment's hottest industries. "That's the trick," Hamilton says. "That's how I get invited to the party. They ask me to write the food stuff. But obviously I have my own agenda—my real story, one in which I'm not on top all the time, where I'm often trying to just stay above water. I don't feel like people talk about that enough, so in the book, I decided to just tell the truth of my own experience, which is: I'm frequently trying to figure it all out. But I have to be honest, it's nice after 12 hours of writing alone to have some antidote, some counterpoint. Every writer should have a restaurant."

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"Let me get into my sweater set," says Hamilton, "with my cleavage out and my hair down." There's a TV crew (from a network that asked not to be named) in her restaurant and a big, black lens pointed at her angular face. Something called a Diva-Lite is making her a little more camera-crisp. The crew has been here for almost five hours, filming a two-minute interview Hamilton would have turned down if it didn't coincide with the release of her book. It's almost noon. Hamilton's poise is receding, and she can't help mocking the experience, poking some fun at the Giada de Laurentiis types who seem to spend more time in hair and makeup than they do getting dirty on the line.

Watching a food show come together from behind the scenes is conceptually a lot like watching the making of pornography; each consecutive and repetitive take eliminates more and more of the central gesture's original meaning. Plate the dish. Okay. Plate the dish again. Can you plate that again? And say that thing you said while you were plating it? Again? Okay? Again? By take six, all the love is gone. "That's what an actor would do," Hamilton tells the crew, "and I'm not that person."

Ironically, Hamilton possesses all the physical aspects required of an on-air personality: enviable posture, gleaming blue eyes, a sinewy figure that suggests a metabolic immunity to carbs, and just the right ratio of sex to calm in her voice. But it's evident her mentality clashes with the whole notion of cooking on tape. When asked by the director to comment on her restaurant's influence, she refuses. Later, she e-mails me: "they asked me to say whether i thought i had had any influence in the restaurant scene of today!! they were asking me to declare my own sphere of influence! i nearly died. can you imagine? being the freaking imbecile on camera who says, `well, yes, bob i do feel that i have been hugely influential on the restaurant scene of today.' " But, ever the working pro, Hamilton battles through her reluctance and gives the crew exactly what they need: perfect, idiosyncratic sound bites that leave one of the producers pumping her fist in triumph.

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With the release of her memoir, and Prune perpetually packed for brunch, lunch, and dinner, it's clear Hamilton could brand herself as aggressively as any number of chefs who have slapped their airbrushed headshots on jarred sauces, laser-scrawled their signatures onto lines of QVC cookwear, and sauntered all over Europe playing tea party, on camera, with Gwyneth. But Hamilton has about as much use for celebrity as she does for cute little plates of food with painted-on streaks of sauce. "I don't think I'd like to be famous," she says. "I wouldn't mind getting paid. So if fame translates into two bathrooms and three bedrooms—one for each kid and one for me—that's how famous I want to be. Just enough to get an apartment and not have to take a damn shower and step on the freaking tubby toys all the time. That's all I need. The famous part doesn't appeal."

Neither does the idea of a Prune spin-off, except, perhaps iconoclastically, in Las Vegas. "Wouldn't it be funny and brilliant to go to Vegas and open a 30-seat restaurant behind the casino, down some alley, with a tattoo parlor next door?" says Hamilton. "Seriously," she continues, "I'm gonna stick with this little guy here. I really like this restaurant. We're coming into the second decade. I like the fact that in San Francisco you can walk into Zuni Café. It's been open for more than 25 years. And it crackles with freshness. It is alive and tended to and someone still gives a shit. Everything. Juice for the drink has just been squeezed. The wood smoke is there. The girls on the line have their hair pulled back. It's on point. No one there has said, `You know what I'm going to do? I'm gonna open six other restaurants and leave a junior manager here to take care of the old favorites.' That's what I would like for Prune. I would like to be here in 25 years, which is how long we have the lease for."

It's only when the crew takes down the last light that things get back to normal. Hamilton uncrosses her arms and retreats to the basement with the whole suckling pig they asked her to prepare for the segment but decided not to use. "It'll be a great dinner special," she tells one of her cooks, balancing the beast on a board while descending the stairs. Customers, who have been circling the block like sharks, quickly fill the dining room. The food coming from the kitchen is once again for eating. When Hamilton returns to my table, it's to take care of me. "I thought you'd want to try the pig," she says, presenting a salty, savory crisp of skin cantilevered over a few luscious strands of meat. The cameras go and reality begins again.

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